“Sponsored Display launches custom headline and logo worldwide” (Source: Amazon Advertising)

• Amazon announced a new customization feature for Sponsored Display where you can now personalize your Sponsored Display product targeting ad creatives with custom headlines and brand logos.
• The new feature will help you create more engaging ad creatives to convey your brand message. These Sponsored Display ads with a custom headline and logo may appear alongside product description pages, customer reviews, shopping results pages, or under the Featured Offer.
• You can build, preview, and edit headlines and brand logos as part of your product targeting campaign management. Preview and make any edits to the headline and logo before submitting the campaign for review. 
• Ad campaigns will go live once the submitted customized campaigns receive approval through Amazon’s review process.
• Read the full article here

Amazon’s Prime Day will be very different this year, and sellers are bracing for chaos” (Source: CNBC) 

• Online shopping remains strong heading into the holidays and analysts expect Prime Day sales will top last year’s event with an estimated $10B in global sales and US memberships close to 143M.
• This year, Amazon has expanded its warehouse footprint and they’re on track to open 33 new fulfillment centers in the U.S. There were 158 last-mile delivery stations opened between March and October, alone.
• These last-mile facilities are likely to give Amazon a leg up against retail rivals during the holiday shopping season.
• But Amazon will need the extra space in order to weather the back-to-back rush of Prime Day and the holiday shopping season, as well as to prevent the delays and out-of-stock notices they faced back in March. 
• With Prime Day taking place in October, Amazon’s “peak season” will last longer than ever before. But a mid-October Prime Day could still result in some chaos since third-party sellers face limits on the number of goods they can ship into Amazon’s warehouses.
• Read the full article here

“Amazon’s Vine Program for Sellers: What Is It? And Is It Worth It?” (Source: JungleScout)

• The Vine is a product review program created by Amazon to provide customers with honest and unbiased reviews. Amazon Vine invites customers to receive a product for free in exchange for a review. 
• Once you’re enrolled in the program, one of the Vine Voices can request to review your product. You’ll provide the product for free in exchange for their review. There are no enrollment fees, just cover the cost of the products provided to reviewers.
• In order to enter the Vine Program, you’ll need to have brand registry,  give away each product for free, have fewer than 30 reviews, and have an image and a description on the listing.
• Some pros of Amazon’s Vine program include greater review potential, thorough and higher-quality reviews, more practical feedback, and no enrollment fee.
•  Potential cons include: reviews are not guaranteed, positive or otherwise, and it’s only available to brand registered sellers.
• Read the full article here

“Is Amazon About To Take Over Online Advertising?” (Source: Forbes) 

• Amazon is the leading advertiser in the United States, spending around $6.9 billion annually. However, there is a big difference between Amazon and other tech giants such as Google or Facebook.
• While Google or Facebook have been busy building a huge advertising platform and have more or less succeeded in building an e-commerce platform around it, Amazon has taken the opposite route.
• Amazon built an enormously successful e-commerce platform and is now creating a system so that the participants can pay to highlight their products. 
• Since its advertising is conceptually attached to the place where the sale takes place and the company wants that sale to take place, we can expect more and more advertisers, who see its potential, to be interested in it, while the efficiency of hyper-segmented advertising on Google or Facebook is now in doubt. 
• This advertising ecosystem, built around the point of sale and bringing the user closer to the final click that puts the product in the cart, may offer a healthier, more sensible, and less frustrating user experience. 
• Read the full article here